For the last couple of weeks we have been talking about mobile friendly websites and what needs to be done if your website is not mobile friendly. In case you were wondering if your website is mobile friendly, go to Google’s mobile-friendly test, type in your website address, and Google will run a series of tests to determine if it is mobile friendly.

Last week, I talked about the options you have to get your website mobile friendly if it wasn’t mobile friendly already. However, that is just the “what” aspect of making your site mobile friendly. I think it is also important to know the “how” aspect of making your website mobile friendly so you know what to expect.

This is not a quick fix! We have found that for WordPress websites, is takes approximately 20 – 25 hours to make a website mobile friendly. This is the case for websites that are converting their existing design to be mobile friendly or for websites that are selecting a new pre-made design from websites like Theme Forest, Elegant Themes, etc. Below are descriptions of what to expect with either of these options:

When converting an existing WordPress theme, most of the time involved (75%-80%) is in the development/coding of the design to be mobile friendly. However, after that is complete, there is still time put into installing & testing the theme, having any errors corrected, and testing again.

When selecting a new pre-made design from websites like Theme Forest or Elegant Themes, there is time spent researching new themes. This often times takes longer than expected, especially if you are particular about the colors, style, and layout of your new design. After purchasing the theme and installing it into the WordPress website, often times there is customization required to make sure that all the previous content displays properly (header, content body, footer). Then it is wise to review the site to make sure that the content displays properly and that all the previous functionality (plugins) work correctly. If there are any errors found in the review, there will be time needed to correct the errors.

Have you gone through the process of checking the mobile friendliness of your site? If it wasn’t mobile friendly, what are your plans? Please post your comments and thoughts below!

If you are interested in taking your website to the next level with a new, mobile friendly design, please contact us here!

]]>http://blog.ourchurch.com/2015/03/30/why-is-it-march-madness-for-non-mobile-friendly-websites-part-2/feed/0http://blog.ourchurch.com/2015/03/30/why-is-it-march-madness-for-non-mobile-friendly-websites-part-2/Google #5: You Don’t Need to be at Your Desk to Need an Answerhttp://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/06yNbA-6Jl4/
http://blog.ourchurch.com/2015/03/28/google-5-you-dont-need-to-be-at-your-desk-to-need-an-answer/#commentsSat, 28 Mar 2015 12:33:47 +0000http://blog.ourchurch.com/?p=49378

Mobile is no longer a “shiny new object.” It’s the norm. In fact, mobile Internet usage now exceeds PC Internet usage (source)

The world is increasingly mobile: people want access to information wherever they are, whenever they need it. We’re pioneering new technologies and offering new solutions for mobile services that help people all over the globe to do any number of tasks on their phone, from checking email and calendar events to watching videos.

2) Make your email newsletters mobile-friendly. 66% of all email is read on a phone or tablet. (source) You want your subscribers to be able to read them.

3) Make your website content mobile-friendly. What do people want when they’re on their phones and tablets? A phone number and address if they’re trying to contact or visit you. Beyond that, people listen to more audio and watch more video on mobile devices than computers, so consider putting more audio and video on your site.

4) Make use of texting. US smartphone owners who use text (that’s 92 percent) send an average of 111 messages per week, and 49 percent of those who use social media daily would rather text than call a person. Most organizations send regular enewsletters to subscribers. The next step is to send regular texts to a text list, and to respond to questions and comments via text.

5) Think globally. In the last several years, billions of people around the world who never had access to the Internet before, began using the Internet through their phones. A few years ago while in Kenya on a missions trip, I saw first hand that even the poorest people in the most remote places are texting and accessing the Internet through their phones. Are you trying to connect with them?

Discuss

What changes do you see in the shift towards mobile communications?

What changes have you and your organization made to connect with people via mobile?

Google’s Zineb Ait Bahajji was recently quoted as saying the upcoming mobile-friendly ranking algorithm that will launch on April 21st will have more of an impact on Google’s search results than the Google Panda or Google Penguin updates did.

This further emphasizes what Google (and we here at Christian Web Trends) have been saying…

This is a big deal!

Get your website mobile friendly by April 21 or it’s search rankings and traffic will drop.

Google also clarified in a Google+ hangout there are no degree’s of mobile-friendliness. A website is either mobile-friendly or its not.

Is Your Website Mobile-Friendly?

The easiest way to see if Google thinks your web page is mobile-friendly or not is to pick up your phone and search Google for your site. If you see the mobile-friendly label next to your site in the live mobile search results, it’s mobile-friendly. If not, it’s not.

We can create a mobile-friendly website for your organization pretty quickly but you’ve got act fast. This is not some manufactured urgency. The April 21 launch date is coming up fast and a lot of website developers are getting inundated with request to make websites mobile-friendly.

If we might be able to help you make your website mobile-friendly, please contact us.

What do you think of Google’s coming mobile-friendly algorithm change?

For most people, “March Madness” is a term to describe the NCAA basketball tournament which leads to the crowning of a national champion. However, this year in the world of the web design and SEO, March Madness takes on a whole new meaning…

As we wrote about last week, Google recently announced that starting on April 21st 2015, they will be expanding their use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. In simple language, this means that if your website is not mobile friendly (AKA “responsive”), your website rankings will be impacted starting on April 21st.

The clock is ticking! This gives you approximately 1 month to get your rear in gear and plan how you are going to make your website mobile friendly. If your website is already mobile friendly, congratulations! You are ahead of the game. If your website is not mobile friendly, you should consider the following options:

Ask the developer who built your website if it can be made mobile friendly. If it can, ask them how much it will cost.

If your current site cannot be converted to be mobile friendly, ask about the option of selecting a new design that is mobile friendly. If you have a CMS like WordPress, this is a viable option. Selecting and installing a new WordPress theme requires some technical knowledge and will take some time, so unless you are a website guru, I suggest hiring a developer or website company do it.

If your website can’t be converted to a mobile friendly version, you will need to build a new website. I realize that this isn’t the news you wanted to hear, however, we here at OurChurch.Com would be happy to talk with you about building a mobile friendly site that will help you reach your goals. You can contact us here to talk more about it.

Craw into a hole and pretend that none of this is going to happen. This may require you pulling out your 8-tracks and parachute pants but at least you can reminisce about the good ole’ days while listening to ABBA and The Boss!

Google search works because it relies on the millions of individuals posting links on websites to help determine which other sites offer content of value. We assess the importance of every web page using more than 200 signals and a variety of techniques, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, which analyzes which sites have been “voted” to be the best sources of information by other pages across the web.

We want our websites and their content to rank well in Google so new people will find us and connect with us, right?

So, if we want to win the “election” in Google’s democracy (aka good search rankings), we need to “get out the vote.” Here are

5 Things that Matter in Democracy and Search Rankings

1) Quality matters. It’s important to remember that just like a bad candidate will never get elected regardless of the campaign, bad content will never rank well no matter how much you try to get people to link to it and share it in social media. The best place to start is always with good, interesting, helpful, engagin content.

2) Communication matters. Once you have quality content, you need to let people know about it. Build an email list. Enable people to subscribe on your website. Email them when you’ve published something new.

3) Social media matters. Google’s search algorithm looks at social signals – likes, tweets, shares, +1s. But you can’t simply wake up one day and get a bunch of likes, tweets, and shares. You have to make connections and build relationships over time. You have to engage and add value if you want them to read/listen/watch your content and like/share it.

4) Calls to action matter. You can’t assume people know you want them to like something, share something, comment on something, subscribe to your email list. If you want people to do something specific, you have to ask. It’s that simple.

5) Passion matters. It’s really not about how many people “like” your Facebook page or subscribe to your email list. That’s because all “likers” (if that’s a word) and subscribers are not created equal. Most of them don’t do squat. What really matters is how many raving fans – literally FANATICS – you have.

What moves your church, school, nonprofit or business forward are those people who passionately believe in what you are doing!

These are the people who talk about you to their friends. They share your stuff on Facebook. They volunteer. And they do all these things without being asked or paid to do it (though as mentioned in #4, you still should ask).

Be passionate about what you do, engage the passions of others, and you will get out the vote and see your search rankings rise.

What are you doing to engage Google’s search democracy? What do you want to start doing or do better?

For the last several months we’ve been telling you Google is beginning to factor mobile friendliness into its mobile search rankings. Well, recently Google took the unprecedented step of announcing a major algorithm change well ahead of implementing it.

That tops our news in this month’s SEO update, but here’s the list of headlines we cover:

Mark your calendar, April 21st, Google Will Make a Major Search Algorithm Update

Net Neutrality Law Passed

Google Tests Live Chat With Businesses Directly From Search Results

Is Google Mobile Testing a “Slow” Label In Search Results?

Google Now Offering One-On-One Support For Webmasters With Hacked Sites

From time to time, I am called by someone who is frustrated with their website because their current website feels old and stagnant. They usually feel this way because the content on the website hasn’t been changed or updated in quite some time. However, coming up with all new content for your website may be a very daunting task.

So what can you do to change up your website without taking up much of your time or needing a programming degree?

Change The Pictures on Your Site!

It is amazing how simply changing the images used on your website can give it a new, updated look. In addition, for most websites, changing out an image is not a difficult task and can be completed in a few minutes.

So where do you get the images to use on your website? Below are three easy options for finding images:

Use pics from your phone or camera: Sometimes that pic you took of the sunset, kids playing in the park, or group of friends is a good fit for an image that you can use on your website.

Reuse images that you have used in the past. If you have written blog articles, used images in other media, or built other websites, you may have images you have used before that can be used again. The image used in this post was also used in a post from a couple of years ago;)

Stock images: There are plenty of stock image websites like Shutterstock or iStockphoto from which you can purchase stock images. However, if you want stock images for free there are also other options. In this past blog post, we wrote about some of the websites you can go to that offer free stock images.

What are your thoughts? Is it time for you to change the images on your website? Please post your comment below.

We know your time is valuable, so when you’re seeking an answer on the web you want it right away–and we aim to please. We may be the only people in the world who can say our goal is to have people leave our website as quickly as possible… We keep speed in mind with each new product we release… And we continue to work on making it all go even faster.

Faster Everything

Yes, we all want faster websites, but this principle goes beyond just websites and it applies to all churches, schools, nonprofits and businesses. We all want

Faster meetings

Faster delivery of products

Faster completion of projects

Faster replies to our calls and emails

Shorter waits to meet with a pastor or counselor

Everybody wants faster, but most organizations are not faster because faster is difficult. Faster requires 3 important things.

1) Faster requires intentionality.

Nothing gets faster by accident. It takes a lot of thought to figure out how to get faster and a lot of work to implement strategies to get faster. Google engineers meticulously “shave bits and bytes from our pages.” Runners train relentlessly to get faster. Faster starts with a choice. You have to really want it!

2) Faster requires saying no.

The average car weighs over 3,000 pounds and goes around 100 miles per hour. The average Indy race car goes over 220 miles per hour, but to do that they cut the weight of the car down below 1600 pounds. Indy car teams have say no to a lot of features we take for granted – no audio system, no rear view camera, no windows.

Google offers dozens of services yet there are links to just 6 on their homepage and no text or images to explain or sell them.

If you want a faster website, you have to say no to some plugins and content.

If you want faster meetings, you have to say no to some agenda items and lengthy mid-meeting rants and tangents

If you want to complete projects faster, you have to say no to other projects

If you’re a pastor or counselor and want faster wait times to meet with you, you have to say no to other things on your schedule.

3) Faster requires resources.

Google pays their engineers to meticulously “shave bits and bytes from our pages.” An athlete who is serious about getting faster gets a coach or personal trainer. In other words, faster costs money.

If you want to get faster, you may need to…

Hire an assistant or secretary for yourself

Hire a business or ministry coach to look at your processes

Hire additional engineers or customer service staff

Buy software that will automate or help you better organize things

Develop processes in areas where you’re currently “winging it” so you’re not making the same decisions over and over.

In what ways would you like to get faster? What do you need to do to get faster?

Whether your developing a new website or upgrading an existing one, there are some SEO tips that not everybody incorporates into their plan. However, they happen to be surprisingly effective in getting your website to the coveted top spot!

Research Your Competitions Winning Keyword Phrases

After identifying the best keywords to focus on for your website, make sure you look at your competitors websites. Look at the on-site and offsite aspects of what you believe is their to help their SEO initiatives. You will start to see links and text on their site that stand out because most likely it’s intentionally there to boost their search ranking. Research what you can do to beat them in organic search for those same phrases.

What Else Is Your Competition Doing?

If the goal is to get the competitors traffic coming to your site, then it is imperative that you understand why Google ranks them where they do. After coming up with a list of keywords that your direct competitors are using, you can also check if they have higher domain recognition than you, and if their web pages have more page authorities or back links than you do. There are free online tools that make it easy to gather this information, such as installing a free Moz toolbar or SEM Rush’s free addition.

Determine How Your Website is Different From Competitors

After checking what your competitors have to offer, the next thing you need to do is to determine how you can improve the calls to action of your own website. How can you make it better than your competitor’s site?

Take note of things that you can do to make your site better and more appealing to your customers. If your competition doesn’t have a useful blog, than that would be a good place to start. Blogs are a source of more pages and rich high quality information that Google recognizes and awards ranking for.

There are several free tools that will help organize all of the important aspects of the competition that are earning them their rank. One that is often used is SeoBook. also, Microsoft has a new free download tool named Web SEO Toolkit

What are you doing to learn from your competitors and improve your website and SEO?

]]>http://blog.ourchurch.com/2015/03/11/new-seo-strategies-that-will-get-more-traffic-coming-to-you/feed/5http://blog.ourchurch.com/2015/03/11/new-seo-strategies-that-will-get-more-traffic-coming-to-you/How Did This Old School Business Saw Their Way Into The Modern Era?http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ChristianWebTrends/~3/ZvQpvWvr5PQ/
http://blog.ourchurch.com/2015/03/09/how-did-this-old-school-business-saw-their-way-into-the-modern-era/#commentsMon, 09 Mar 2015 11:26:17 +0000http://blog.ourchurch.com/?p=49302

Just outside of Tampa Florida, Haas Brothers Inc. has been serving their clients by providing custom staircases and woodworking through old fashioned craftsmanship.

However, earlier this month, Haas Brothers combined old fashioned craftsmanship with modern technology as they launched their new website design. The best part of the new design: it’s mobile friendly!

Prior to their new design, their site had the same look for over 5 years. In addition, if someone viewed their site on a mobile phone or tablet, the text, images, and buttons were very small because it was not a responsive design.

Having a design that wasn’t mobile friendly was hurting them because the user’s experience was not as good and Google wasn’t noting in the search results that their site was mobile friendly (possibly deterring potential customers). Now, they have a beautiful new look and only a week after they launched their new design, their new website has been identified by Google as being mobile friendly!

If you have a WordPress website, the process changing out your old design with a new responsive design will require a fair level of website design/development knowledge. There will likely be some customization required and the new design may offer options that will require new or changed content. However, when the change is complete, you will have a wonderful new design that will be more user friendly for your visitors and attract new traffic through the search engines.

Check out haasbrothers.com. What do you think of the new design? Please post your comments below.

If you are interested in taking your website to the next level with a new, mobile friendly design, please contact us here!